This is the Place: Mapping Memory and Home in Regional Writing with Kristen Arnett— March 9

Writing about place and home that has "main character syndrome.”

Dorothy Allison once wrote that “Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.” Part of writing regionally means discovering the things that you thought you knew about your memory and perception are colored and distorted by the environment that shaped you. In regional writing, setting is key. How is home constructed in place narrative? Through application of all five senses? Does it require thinking of place as character? Attendees will spend time in this session discussing the craft of place and regional writing in narrative works, essays, and pop culture/media. This will be a collaborative process; one that allows us to consider (and reconsider) questions of “home” when it comes to creative work. Readers will generate work in-session and take home prompts when the workshop is complete.

What you will learn

• To hone the craft of writing place scenes

• To hone the craft of reading place scenes

• To explore the nuances and intersections of how "home" works in various types of creative writing and in pop culture/media

Workshop takeaways

Students will leave with generated work, further reading, further writing prompts, and a better sense of how to read/write place and home in regional work

Additional info

If you can't attend this class live, it will be recorded! Students will receive a recording the day after the class, and it will be available for 30 days.

About the Instructor

Kristen Arnett is the queer author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her next novel, CLOWN, will be published by Riverhead Books (Spring 2025), followed by the publication of an untitled collection of short stories. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and lives in Orlando, Florida.